Rush Limbaugh and the Georgetown contraception controversy

As you know, President Obama has been trying to cheer up a glum America – depressed by his staggering waste of our money, gigantic deficits, soaring gas prices, and disintegration of the U.S. workforce – by encouraging us to think about condoms. This has worked remarkably well, even convincing many to set aside their fears about the outrageous encroachment of Obama’s mega-government upon religious liberty, and smile as they think about little balloons filled with happiness.

As part of this effort, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi decided to hold a Congressional hearing with a single college student, a young lady named Sandra Fluke, who is studying law at Georgetown University. At this hearing, Fluke claimed to have conducted startling research that reveals “four out of every ten co-eds are having so much sex that it’s hard to make ends meet if they have to pay for their own contraception,” as related in a CNS News report:

“Forty percent of the female students at Georgetown Law reported to us that they struggled financially as a result of this policy (Georgetown student insurance not covering contraception), Fluke reported.

It costs a female student $3,000 to have protected sex over the course of her three-year stint in law school, according to her calculations.

“Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school,” Fluke told the hearing.

The logical thing for America to do, upon learning of this hearing, would be to immediately eject Nancy Pelosi from Congress, but we passed that particular border of sanity a long time ago.

Instead, some people felt obliged to check Fluke’s numbers, consider the very modest price of birth control – with bulk condoms readily available for pennies apiece, and not terribly difficult to obtain for free – and calculate how often the average Georgetown co-ed must be having sex. Not to mention that birth-control pills can be purchased at discount stores in the Georgetown area for less than ten dollars per month, even without insurance coverage.

That’s about 10 percent of the three-year cost Fluke’s “study” supposedly “revealed.” And no matter what this equipment costs, why should American taxpayers be compelled to purchase it by force of law, and provide it to other people for “free?”

Again, the obvious conclusion here is that Nancy Pelosi is a dangerous imbecile who belongs nowhere near the levers of power, and her Party has obviously concluded that the rest of America is no more intelligent than she is. Pelosi has a gigantic staff, which could have easily run Fluke’s numbers in real-time as she was speaking, if not beforehand. Instead, she simply accepted the garbage this young woman was shoveling, and used it to advance her policy preferences.

Meanwhile, President Obama is once again proceeding on the assumption his supporters are morons, publishing a mocked-up “Employer Authorization for Contraception,” which helpless American employees would supposedly have to obtain in order to purchase birth control, “if Mitt Romney and a few Republican senators get their way.”

This is a slam at Congressional amendments designed to install religious conscience exemptions for those who have a moral objection to being forced to pay for other people’s contraception. It would in no way, shape, or form “ban birth control” or interfere with anyone’s ability to purchase his own. Evidently the President believes his supporters are too slow-witted to understand the difference.

That’s a big story, isn’t it? Obama’s been caught lying outrageously to Americans, and very obviously treating his supporters as fools. But instead of covering this, the supposedly “impartial media” chose to focus upon radio host Rush Limbaugh. While discussing the Georgetown student’s testimony on Wednesday, Limbaugh raised his voice over the strangled cries of lawyers in love to ask:

What does it say about the college co-ed Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.

The same people who claim that relief from the mandatory taxpayer purchase of birth control is equivalent to a ban on contraception went nuts, as House Democrats demanded Speaker John Boehner publicly rebuke Limbaugh for his remarks. Not surprisingly, it worked, as CNN reports:

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner on Friday said the top Republican condemns a controversial comment made by conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh but also disagrees with those who launched fundraising efforts over the remark.

“The speaker obviously believes the use of those words was inappropriate, as is trying to raise money off the situation,” Michael Steel, Boehner’s spokesman, told CNN.

His response comes after House Democrats called on Boehner to repudiate Limbaugh’s remark, in which the talk show host called a young woman who appeared before a congressional panel a ‘slut’ and a ‘prostitute.’

That is notwhat Limbaugh did. He said the implications of her own testimony, and the idea of demanding that other people finance her sexual activities, amount to the logical equivalent of prostitution. Had she appeared in public to demand a thousand dollars per year of compulsory financing for collegiate sex a generation ago, that would have been the nearly universal public response. People would also have wondered why the boyfriends of these Georgetown co-eds weren’t chipping in to cover the costs, a point Limbaugh raised in the same broadcast. We aren’t far from a day when such young men would have been widely dismissed as “cads.”

But now they’re all useful clients of the State, their urges are a more pressing matter of official concern than the preservation of religious and economic liberty, and criticism of their demands is apparently an urgent matter for Congressional attention. Does anyone recall Nancy Pelosi being called upon to denounce the “edgy” remarks of liberals during her tenure as Speaker?

Liberal hysterics have also been trying to gin up a boycott of Limbaugh’s show, and succeeded in convincing a mattress store called Sleep Train to stop advertising with him. (Wouldn’t they be better off advertising on a liberal show where the audience is already half-asleep anyway?) There is also word that an online florist called ProFlowers is “reconsidering its marketing plan.”

One wonders how many of the boycott targets are aware of Limbaugh’s actual remarks and their context, as opposed to reading media-malpractice bulletins that simply say “Rush Limbaugh called a college girl a slut.” The narrative would be harder to sell if reporters actually do their damned jobs and accurately related that he was saying Fluke’s own argument was tantamount to demanding she be treated as a prostitute. The Left knows it can’t really get anywhere by telling the truth in an argument like this, or respecting the intelligence and conscience of everyone involved. Better to proceed in accordance with their core belief that Americans are not rational people, responsible for the consequences of exercising their liberty, but rather dimwitted beasts in need of control.

Update: Blogger Just A Grunt at Jammie Wearing Fools says that a more proper word to describe Sandra Fluke might be “professional activist”:

For me the interesting part of the story has the ever evolving “coed”. I put that in quotes because in the beginning she was described as a Georgetown law student. It was then revealed that prior to attending Georgetown she was an active women’s right advocate. In one of her first interviews she is quoted as talking about how she reviewed Georgetown’s insurance policy prior to committing to attend and seeing that it didn’t cover contraceptive services she decided to attend with the express purpose of battling this policy. During this time she was described as a 23 y/o coed. Magically at the same time congress is debating the forced coverage of contraception she appears and is even brought to capitol hill to testify. This morning in an interview with Matt Lauer on the Today show it was revealed that she is 30 y/o NOT the 23 that had been reported all along.

In other words, folks, you are being played. She has been an activist all along and the Dems were just waiting for the appropriate time to play her.

I doubt that history is related in the fundraising and boycott letters shrieking that Rush Limbaugh called a college girl a slut.